Republican candidates for governor of Virginia, 2021’s marquee race, indulged concerns from the party’s base concerns about election integrity and campaigned on the issue.
But when it came to the state party running its own “unassembled” convention nomination process, pushes from the party and the candidates for measures to preserve integrity created a hectic and confusing process that created the exact scenarios many Republicans and former President Donald Trump complained about during the 2020 election.
The chaos, hypocrisy, and logistical nightmare fueled frustration among party officials and campaign staff.
“Not sure how we can preach about election integrity and then just change the f—ing rules,” one Republican operative in the state told the Washington Examiner Monday.
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Gubernatorial candidates embraced the election integrity concerns. Glenn Youngkin, former co-CEO of the Carlyle Group private equity firm, launched an “election integrity task force.” Entrepreneur and investor Pete Snyder put out an election integrity policy plan. “Trump in heels” candidate state Sen. Amanda Chase refuses to call Joe Biden the president.
“In our minds, he has not won us over as a legitimate president, duly elected, because we believe that the 2020 presidential election was stolen,” Chase told the Washington Examiner last week.
The Virginia Republican Party, which has been historically averse to nominating candidates by a state-run primary, opted to return to nominating candidates for statewide offices by a convention. Because the coronavirus pandemic prevented thousands of people from gathering in a convention space, the party opted to run its own “unassembled” convention with ranked-choice ballots to simulate convention rounds.
In an effort to secure the nomination system, the party allowed votes only in person on the day of the Saturday convention, with few exceptions.
But lack of a neutral government administration of the election created problems, and details of the process consisted of many practices other Republicans objected to in 2020.
Preregistered delegates cast ballots at one of 36 drive-up sites across the state. Republicans in Texas sued over drive-thru voting locations for the 2020 general election.
Chase, Youngkin, and Kirk Cox, a longtime state delegate and another candidate for governor, signed a letter asking the state party not to use a certain election software vendor to count the paper ballots. The party then decided to tabulate results by a hand count but met a dayslong delay in determining a winner. Trump frequently complained that final results of the 2020 election were not known on the night of Election Day, suggesting foul play if results make counting take longer.
The party did address concerns about ballot-counting observation access by livestreaming the hourslong ballot-counting process on YouTube. But a housekeeper carting in a tray of refreshments into the secure ballot-counting room and breaking a taped seal prompted an investigation and calls to lawyers, the Washington Post reported.
Allegations of rival campaigns rigging the process plagued the campaign. Legal counsel for the state party was on the payroll for Snyder’s campaign, leading to him stepping down from matters involving the party until after the convention. Some campaigns reportedly followed a party official car driving boxes of ballots nearly two hours from Prince William County to Richmond.
And despite a Republican-supported state law requiring an ID to vote, some local parties started accepting delegate registration forms that were incomplete or lacked a voter ID, according to NBC News.
Frequently changing convention rules and plans angered campaigns and operatives trying to navigate the process and explain it to voters. Originally, ballots in which voters picked just one candidate for all seven ranked-choice selections would be thrown out. But state Chairman Rich Anderson told delegates days before the convention that they would be counted. The original plan was to tabulate the votes for lieutenant governor on Monday and then gubernatorial ballots after that, but the schedule later switched.
Anderson also reportedly neglected to hire a security guard to look after the ballots overnight, thinking that the hotel where they were being stored would do so. On Monday, Youngkin’s campaign allegedly hired an additional security guard to stand outside the room where ballots were being counted.
The messy process resulted in conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, who said he had registered to be a delegate weeks ago, being disenfranchised because his information was not found when he went to vote.
“Bummer,” he wrote in a tweet. “And no provisional ballots!”
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Chase, who believes a convention was chosen as a nomination method in order to block her from winning the nomination in a primary, said that the convention process “disenfranchises a lot of people who would have normally wanted to weigh in on those decisions.”
“We should have one person, one vote,” she said, “and conventions don’t allow that.”
